A Woman Was Found In A Cardboard Box. 50 Years Later, We Finally Know Who She Is.

An elderly Chicago woman has been identified 50 years after her dead body was found stuffed in a box in Indiana.

The DNA Doe Project helped identify the woman as Jane Hart, who was found in a cardboard box in rural Indiana in 1976. She was 69 years old at the time of her murder.

The breakthrough brings closure to this decades-long mystery that started on October 8, 1976. That day, a farmer tending to his field near Otterbein, Indiana, found a box about 15 yards from a nearby road, according to DNA Doe Project. When the farmer looked in the box, he found Hart’s body stuffed inside. She had been shot in the back of the head. Local authorities reported at the time that the box had only been in the field for about 12 hours, but estimated the woman had been killed about one week before her body was discovered.

“Everybody knew everybody, so it was a big deal, you know, finding a dead body in a box,” Curtis Skoog, who was 16 at the time his dad found the box, told CBS. “I can’t explain to you how awful I felt.”

It wasn’t until 2021 that DNA Doe Project got involved after the Benton County Coroner’s Office brought the case to the organization.

After Hart’s DNA profile was generated, the team was able to determine that the unidentified woman was of Croatian descent. Though that was quickly identified, Hart’s DNA had just a 1.6% match to other DNAs in the databases available.

“We could tell that our Jane Doe had Croatian ancestry, which posed a challenge,” said team co-leader Harmony Vollmer. “Without more people of Eastern European descent uploading to the GEDmatch.com, FamilyTreeDNA.com and DNAJustice.org databases we have access to, cases like this will remain tricky to solve.”

The team made a breakthrough in 2024 when research led them to a Croatian woman who immigrated to the US in 1905 and gave birth to a daughter the next year.

The daughter was brought to an orphanage, and the DNA Doe Project was able to find census records showing that the same woman later moved from Ohio to Chicago as an adult. Lo and behold, her name was Jane Hart, and in the 1970s, she appeared to vanish from the public records.

“We uncovered further documentation from institutions that Jane had lived in, as well as probate records linking her to her family,” said Traci Onders, director of case management of the DNA Doe Project. “This research revealed genetic and genealogical connections that enabled us to identify her as a candidate.”

The key was that Hart’s surviving family members were able to identify her. After the family took DNA tests, the results confirmed that the Jane Doe from Benton County, Indiana, was their relative.

Skoog, who had spent his entire life wondering about the woman his dad found in the box, was thankful for the closure.

“It’s been a long road,” he said.